RR:  I’d grown up just looking at art books and I’d look at Rubens and think it was all really fine but, when you actually got to see it, there were certain parts of it painted really roughly, and there were certain parts where the ground colour that had been put down was just sort of left to suggest a shadow, or something like that. I’d get close to it and it was all falling apart and then I’d get back fifteen feet and look at it again. What would amaze me was the confidence of being able to do that, you know when less is more? You just have to develop the kind of confidence to make some sort of crude mark and I does the job, and when you’re three inches away form it, it’s just a mark, but when you’re fifteen feet back it sits in the right space.

HK: So you’d go off to the National Gallery and you’d look quite seriously, and then what would you do? You’d go home and think, “How did he do that?” I mean when I used to read books, and I thought I’d be a writer, I’d read them and think, “Can I do that?”

RR: I think it was more about the technical side of things where I’d think, “Could I do that?” But in a really weird way the images I was more interested in looking at were from films. I was always really in to cinematography and the way things were framed. So I wanted to almost combine the traditional stuff of painting with cinematic ways of looking at things, you know, the way things were cropped and edited down? There’s all that stuff in Film Noir where there’s use of mirrors to reflect things; there would someone looking in a mirror and there’d be the two people behind them, and the way that light and shadow were used, and space and void being played off against each other.

HK: You mentioned shadows earlier.

RR: I guess it’s just because I like the drama that you can create with shadow. At college I was really into Edward Hopper. It’s like the obvious thing of the painting of the café scene, ‘Nighthawks’, and how he’d been inspired to do that, through a short story by Hemingway. It’s all about three sources of lighting going on in that painting, and shadows being chucked all over the place. It’s a really simple painting, but it just is so dramatic, and you wonder about the relationship between the bloke and the woman who are sitting at the counter. I guess that it’s probably unfashionable to be into making narrative work, but I am into trying to tell little stories and vignettes of life.

HK: What is interesting is that there is a lot of emptiness in those pictures. There’s a lot of space, isn’t there, where there’s nothing really going on? Like in the Hemingway story, where there isn’t much going on either, but actually, underneath it all, there’s a lot going on with these people trying to communicate with one another but not quite being able at all. They’re lost in that space, there’s a little figure over there and lots of shadow.

RR: I guess it’s like the painting of the guy and the girl in the back of the car.

HK: That’s a very American picture actually, isn’t it? It looks sort of Fifties.

RR: Yeah, it’s a very significant painting for me because I did it a couple of years ago and it’s called ‘Driving Nowhere’. I guess it’s a loaded thing about a relationship, and what happens with people who are in relationships, who are going along but they’re not actually together.

RR: We’ve spoken about it before, but for me, I can only make work that’s actually got something to do with me, and it’s like I have to once remove it from myself. In a weird way it’s probably like therapy.!

HK: Well, Picasso said that if people wanted to understand his work they should see his diary. It’s interesting the people in your pictures, they’re not speaking to one another, and they’re quite deliberately not speaking. It’s not as if they haven’t got anything to say, they’ve got too much to say, haven’t they?

RR: Yeah, I think that’s actually something that’s been levelled at me before, that I’m not the best communicator in the world – verbally.

HK: The people in your pictures are thinking about things. He’s not talking is he? He’s looking away, he’s thinking about something else. There’s quite clearly stuff going on in their heads, they’re not vacant are they? You found another way though, didn’t you?

RR: Yeah, that is it, I can do it through painting. You know, loads of stuff I’m doing at the moment is about trying to find myself, well, kind of find out who I used to be.

HK: I mean, that man and woman are not thinking about nothing, actually, they’re boiling with something unspoken.

RR: No, no, they’re thinking about where they’re going together, and they should stay together, and they almost don’t want to be together, but they sort of do want to be together…it’s almost like it’s a necessity to be together.

HK: So it must have been difficult for you, if you wanted to speak? Was there some kind of visual culture there? I mean, there wasn’t at my school, that’s why I presume there wasn’t at yours.

RR: I think that actually we were really fortunate, because our art teacher was this really brilliant bloke and he saw that, if you were into art, all he could do was give you all the materials you wanted and just let you get on with it. He would encourage you, but he wouldn’t tell you what to do and how to do it, he would just make sure you had everything to hand.

HK: So you got quite a lot of encouragement actually, you’ve got this art teacher who really believes in you and who will help and encourage you.

RR: Yeah, yeah…..but I guess it was like a weird thing for somebody from where I grew up to go to, let alone university or college, but an art school was just unheard of, because everybody just did a trade.

HK: Who else had you admired? When I was a kid, there were lots of writers who I wanted to be like, and I watched the telly. You know, in Bromley there was nothing. You know, I watched the telly and occasionally on a Sunday night we’d see a writer, or a film would be on the telly, and you’d think “I can do this, I want to be like that.” Who did you look at, I mean did you look at Warhol and Peter Blake and the Sixties stuff, did you look at Expressionism?

RR: I just used to look at everything. I’d look at Picasso, Rubens, Rembrandt. I was into things like Abstract Expressionism and stuff like that. I was into Franz Kline and Peter Blake. Basically for me, it’s like if it’s good then it sticks, and if it’s bullshit then it can fuck off.

HK: So were you looking at a lot of stuff at that age were you? Were you going down to the library and trawling through stuff?

RR: Yeah, yeah. I used to nick books from the school library!

HK: Well, you obviously wanted it very much. I mean all kids nick things, but they don’t nick books on Franz Kline, you know? So, you just were going your own way, you thought I want to do this, I want to go to St Martins?

RR: Yeah.

HK: And how did you know that St Martins was a good place, and that there were good teachers there, and all that stuff?

RR: When I turned up there I knew it was the wrong place, actually, almost the first day I went, because it was so fashion orientated. I didn’t think the painting teachers on the Foundation Course were any good. They all seemed bitter and twisted, and told you on the first day that only one percent of us would still be pursuing the arts in ten years time. When you are eighteen that was like…..actually, it made me even more determined. I just thought “Fuck you! I’m going to be that one percent.”

HK: You’ve got a lot of strength of will, that’s quite a big thing. You weren’t shaking and going “My God! These other kids are so clever, I’ve got no chance”, which is what I felt when I went to university, I was really intimidated and frightened by the whole thing.

RR: The thing I was intimidated by when I was at college was the wordy people. When I started at St Martins there were a couple of fellas there who could talk the talk, and walk the walk, and then you got about six months down the line and you’d realise that was all they could do, they couldn’t actually fucking do anything! Then it happened to me again when I went to Goldsmiths, when I did my degree. I went for lunch on the first day and there were all these people coming out with cryptic jokes about Man Ray’s left ear and there’s me thinking “Fucking Hell! There’s something I ma missing out here.” I was more concerned about who Charlton (Athletic) were playing on Saturday! You know, I guess it’s like once you get to a certain point down the line, and you’ve been doing something for long enough, you can work out who the bullshitters are and who the people who are really doing it here.

HK: And was St Martins a waste of time or was it interesting?

RR: It was a waste of time, literally, until about the last few weeks when I had to transpose a painting from the National Gallery. Basically, you had to go and make a drawing an then repaint it in your own style. That was really liberating, it really freed me up. I remember the Head of foundation said to me “Where are you going to after to do your degree?” and I went “Goldsmiths”, and he said it was the most difficult painting college to get into and, again, it just made me think “That’s where I’m going to apply.” That was just at the time, when I was a first year at Goldsmiths, that it was just beginning to change into all that conceptual stuff.

HK: And you weren’t doing work like that? What was your work like, what were you doing back then?

RR: It was figurative painting. I just used to paint my friends and again it was to do with my life.

HK: Was your work different to the conceptual stuff the other kids were doing there, or were they doing that as well?

RR: What is interesting is, some of the conceptual painters were doing, not exactly figurative, but subjective work. But I think there’s been a certain amount of ‘reinvention’ in some people’s work since they were at college.

HK: What was Goldsmiths like compared to St Martins, then?

RR: At Goldsmiths it was really, really good. It was a really good place to be because you did have some of the old school painters there, you know, these sort of old school British abstract painters.

HK: And did your work change, or your idea about what you wanted to do?

RR: No. I remember when it came to doing your degree show, I thought you had come up with this big final statement about where you were, and I remember Basil Beattie came in one day and said “You seem stuck in a rut!” I said that I couldn’t think of what the big full stop was going to be when I got to my degree show, and he said, “Well you’re looking at it the wrong way!”

HK: You were doing it already?

RR: Yeah, and like you’re going to carry on afterwards so it’s just part of the process, you’re just developing over time.

HK: Was that the time of Brit Art and Damien Hirst? When did art start becoming fashionable, and all that stuff started to happen? Was that the Nineties?

RR: Yeah, I suppose so. It’s really weird because all of those people, well I was at college with them, and it was all just fucking weird.

HK: Did you feel part of that? Were you interested in al that?

RR: No, no, not at all.

HK: You weren’t hanging around with all those people?

RR: No, I knew some of them on a social level, but things that were going on with their work were just nothing to do with me.

HK: Didn’t interest you?

RR: No, I remember I did a little show when I was at Goldsmiths; they had a common room and they encouraged you to put on a show there once a month, and you had to go there and talk about your work, and everyone form the college would come along, and it would be a question and answer thing. I remember I actually called my show ‘I’ve got a bag of my own’, which is after a James Brown song, because basically I just wasn’t following any agendas. You knew what kind of galleries were the trendy galleries that you were supposed to be trying to go with, but it just never, ever bothered me. I just thought people will either like it or they won’t.

HK: You weren’t trying to be fashionable and you were quite aware, in fact, that you didn’t want to be fashionable?